A comprehensive collection of classic texts, contemporary interpretations, guidelines for activists, issue-specific information, and materials for environmentally-oriented religious practice. Sources and contributors include Basho, the Dalai Lama, Thich Nhat Hanh, Gary Snyder, Chögyam Trungpa, Gretel Ehrlich, Peter Mathiessen, Helen Tworkov (editor of Tricycle), and Philip Glass.
Confucianism and Ecology: The Interrelation of Heaven, Earth, and Humans
Confucianism demonstrates a remarkable wealth of resources for rethinking human-earth relations. This second volume in the series on religions of the world and the environment includes sixteen essays that address the ecological crisis and the question of Confucianism from three perspectives: the historical describes this East Asian tradition’s views of nature, social ethics, and cosmology, which may shed light on contemporary problems; a dialogical approach links Confucianism to other philosophic and religious traditions; an examination of engaged Confucianism looks at its involvement in concrete ecological issues.
The Encounter of Man and Nature: The Spiritual Crisis of Modern Man
This work from one of the world’s leading Islamic thinkers is a spiritual tour de force which explores the relationship between the human being and nature as found in many religious traditions, particularly its Sufi dimension. The author stresses the importance of a greater awareness of the origins of both the human being and nature as a means of righting the imbalance that exists in our deepest selves and in our environment.
Daoism and Ecology: Ways within a Cosmic Landscape
Until now, no single work has been devoted to both a scholarly understanding of the complexities of the Daoist tradition and a critical exploration of its contribution to recent environmental concerns. The authors in this volume consider the intersection of Daoism and ecology, looking at the theoretical and historical implications associated with a Daoist approach to the environment. They also analyze perspectives found in Daoist religious texts and within the larger Chinese cultural context in order to delineate key issues found in the classical texts. Through these analyses, they assess the applicability of modern-day Daoist thought and practice in China and the West, with respect to the contemporary ecological situation.
The Space Between: How Empathy Really Works
The Space Between argues that empathy makes us less, not more, biased, contrary to what many seem to think. How? The fact is that a person sits in the center of a web of relationships with her body, her environment, her interests, and other people. These relationships shape how she thinks about herself and the world around her, what she needs, what she wants, and what she values. This is a perspective. We each have one. It represents the significance of the world to us. At the same time, it ignores what matters to others and how or what we are to them. Taking another person’s perspective is a way of reorienting that egocentric image so that it centers on someone else. Relying on empirical evidence from psychology and neuroscience, philosopher Heidi Maibom argues that although a perspective is unique to a person in some ways, it nonetheless possesses characteristics common to all perspectives. This commonality enables us to use our own first-person perspective to represent what matters to others, by imagining that we are at the center of their web of relationships. It also helps reveal who we actually are. It is this form of shifting perspectives that is at the core of impartiality, Maibom argues, and not the cold, scientific eye of so-called objectivity. Why? Because perspectives are ineliminable. A point of view is always a point of view, only an “objective” one leaves out many of the things that matter to human beings.
Logic in Practice
“It must be the desire of every reasonable person to know how to justify a contention which is of sufficient importance to be seriously questioned. The explicit formulation of the principles of sound reasoning is the concern of Logic”.
This book discusses the habit of sound reasoning which is acquired by consciously attending to the logical principles of sound reasoning, in order to apply them to test the soundness of arguments. It isn’t an introduction to logic but it encourages the practice of logic, of deciding whether reasons in argument are sound or unsound. Stress is laid upon the importance of considering language, which is a key instrument of our thinking and is imperfect.
Black Rights/White Wrongs: The Critique of Racial Liberalism
Liberalism’s promise of equal rights has historically been denied to blacks and other people of color. Black Rights/White Wrongs: The Critique of Racial Liberalism argues that rather than being irrelevant to the workings of self-conceived liberal polities today, this history of denial and its current legacy should be regarded as continuing to shape liberalism in fundamental ways. As feminists have conceptualized the dominant form of liberalism as a patriarchal liberalism, this book suggests seeing it as a racialized liberalism. Accordingly, the chapters look at racial liberalism, past and present: “white ignorance” as a guilty ignoring of reality that facilitates ongoing white racial domination; Immanuel Kant’s role as the most important liberal theorist of both personhood and sub-personhood; the centrality of racial exploitation to the economy of the United States; and the evasion of the realities of white supremacy and the need for corrective racial justice in John Rawls’s hugely influential “ideal theory” framing of the derivation of principles of social justice. Nonetheless, the book argues that a deracialized liberalism is both possible and desirable. But it will be necessary to reconstruct liberalism on a new foundation that self-consciously takes its unacknowledged racial history into account.
Lying, Misleading, and What is Said: An Exploration in Philosophy of Language and in Ethics
Many people (both philosophers and not) find it very natural to think that deceiving someone in a way that avoids lying — by merely misleading — is morally preferable to simply lying. Others think this preference is deeply misguided. But all sides agree that there is a distinction. In this book, I undertake a close examination of the lying/misleading distinction. First, I use this very intuitive distinction to shed new light on entrenched debates in philosophy of language over notions like what is said. Next, I tackle the puzzling but widespread moral preference for misleading over lying, arriving at a new view regarding the moral significance of the distinction. Finally, I bring all this together in an examination of historically important and interesting cases, ranging from modern politicians to early Jesuits.
Logical reasoning: a first course
| This book describes how logical reasoning works and puts it to the test in applications. It is self-contained and presupposes no more than elementary competence in mathematics. |
The Annotated Critical Laozi With Contemporary Explication and Traditional Commentary
Chen Guying’s Laozi dissects different versions of the Laozi and provides close readings of traditional and contemporary commentaries, from Han Fei, Wang Bi, and Heshang Gong through to Shi Deqing, Xu Kangsheng and Ding Yuanzhi. This book completely changed Laozi studies in China, where serious student or scholar can ignore Chen’s amazing work. It is the standard interpretation of the Laozi at nearly every Chinese university.